Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen major advances in recent years. While machines were always central to the Marxist analysis of capitalism, AI is a new kind of machine that Marx could not have anticipated. Contemporary machine-learning AI allows machines to increasingly approach human capacities for perception and reasoning in narrow domains.This book explores the relationship between Marxist theory and AI through the lenses of different theoretical concepts, including surplus-...

The utopian promise of the internet, much talked about even a few years ago, has given way to brutal realities: coltan mines in the Congo, electronics factories in China, devastated neighborhoods in Detroit. Cyber-Proletariat shows us the dark-side of the information revolution through an unsparing analysis of class power and computerization.Dyer-Witheford investigates how technology facilitates growing polarization between wealthy elites and precarious workers. He reveals...

An anti-capitalist guide to breaking the power of Big TechBig Tech firms dominate the global economy. But what value do they actually produce? In this brilliant survey of global tech economy, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni argue that the role of firms like Amazon and Google, Palantir and Uber, is in the automation of circulation.By applying digital technologies to processes of market exchange—everything from advertising and shopping, to logisti...

Democratic planning allows us to effectively address the multiple crises of our time through cooperative modes of collective coordination. Given the destructive consequences of contemporary capitalism, such a structural alternative to market economies is needed more than ever.This accessible work examines various approaches that theorise, practise and nurture a creative construction towards varieties of democratic planning. Drawing from current socio-economic and ecological movemen...

Uncovering the class conflicts, geopolitical dynamics, and aggressive capitalism propelling the militarization of the internetGlobal surveillance, computational propaganda, online espionage, virtual recruiting, massive data breaches, hacked nuclear centrifuges and power grids—concerns about cyberwar have been mounting, rising to a fever pitch after the alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Although cyberwar i...

Few books have attempted to contextualize the importance of video game play with a critical social, cultural and political perspective that raises the question of the significance of work, pleasure, fantasy and play in the modern world. The study of why video game play is "fun" has often been relegated to psychology, or the disciplines of cultural anthropology, literary and media studies, communications and other assorted humanistic and social science disciplines. In Utopic Dreams and ...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment.In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such vide...

Struggles for equality happen in all corners of the world. While social and economic justice movements are specific to their different national contexts, identities, and forms of oppression, collaboration and coalition building are required if we are to attain sustainable equality and healing justice.Organizing Equality engages activist and scholarly debates about the organization of social and economic equality movements around the globe. The collection covers a myriad of...

Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen. At the time of its initial publication...

Brings together the highlights of a decade and a half of groundbreaking research into the cultural life of media consumersHenry Jenkins's pioneering work in the early 1990s promoted the idea that fans are among the most active, creative, critically engaged, and socially connected consumers of popular culture and that they represent the vanguard of a new relationship with mass media. Though marginal and largely invisible to the general public at the time, today, med...

Mediatization has emerged as a key concept to reconsider old, yet fundamental questions about the role and influence of media in culture and society. In particular the theory of mediatization has proved fruitful for the analysis of how media spread to, become intertwined with, and influence other social institutions and cultural phenomena like politics, play and religion.This book presents a major contribution to the theoretical understanding of the mediatization of culture and soc...

The renowned Internet commentator and author of How to Fix the Future"expos[es] the greed, egotism and narcissism that fuels the tech world" ( Chicago Tribune).The digital revolution has contributed to the world in many positive ways, but we are less aware of the Internet's deeply negative effects. The Internet Is Not the Answer, by longtime Internet skeptic Andrew Keen, offers a comprehensive look at what the Internet is doing to our liv...